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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]

OP, what a crock of lies you are spreading. As someone who had to fight tooth and nail to keep a false ASD  diagnosis off my kid, I know it makes a huge difference if you are incorrectly labeled. I've seen it firshand.

Parents should ALWAYS insist on accurate labels, even if lazy, incompetent school personnel try to tell you otherwise.  I've gotten every service we've needed AND forced them to use the correct label.

[/quote]

You didn't actually read any of the original post.  A medical diagnosis ISN'T the same thing as a designation to receive IEP services.  It's not a crock of lies; it's the law.  You can receive an IEP for only the following:

• autism;
• deaf-blindness;
• deafness;
• emotional disturbance;
• hearing impairment;
• intellectual disability;
• multiple disabilities;
• orthopedic impairment;
• other health impairment;
• specific learning disability;
• speech or language impairment;
• traumatic brain injury; or
• visual impairment (including blindness).

So your child may not have autism, but unless the school can attribute one of the above 13 potential diagnoses, he won't get an IEP either.  That is my point.  Until the law changes and has more inclusive language, the "label" the school uses may not be accurate but will get you accommodations and services.

But honestly, PP if you've been fighting tooth and nail to keep off an ASD diagnosis from your child, my guess is you are fighting the wrong battle.
[/quote]

Oh no, I read your whole post the first time.

You left out [b]Early Childhood Developmental Delay[/b]. In my state you can be under that until you are 7 years old. At 7, my son was switched to Language Impairment. Specific Learning Disability also would have worked.

I well know a medical diagnosis isn't the same as an educational label. I had multiple medical assessments of my child saying he was not autistic, but instead severely language impaired, with processing issues and learning disabilities. But school districts do whatever is easiest for them. So if they have invested their resources in an ASD program, that's where they want to throw as many kids as possible.  Very few outsiders or even parents understand the difference between school labeling and medical diagnosis, though. Our school district outsources a lot of services, so to have an incorrect autism label leads to a whole lot of wasted, unhelpful therapies and approaches.

My school district personnel was also under the false assumption that Language Impairment would only get you speech therapy.  They were wrong, of course; any tick of any of the categories gets you ALL the services a child needs to access the curriculum. It took a parent with guts like me to stand up to them for them to realize they weren't following the law.

I've met only one parent who was happy they accepted an ASD label for their language-impaired child. The rest curse the day they let themselves be talked into it by the schools, or even doctors who were only trying to "help" because the inflated diagnosis brought more services.

[/quote]

PP, I didn't leave out Developmental Delay--they will give that label to kids who start in early intervention services [b]b/f age 3.[/b]  (Read the link I provided.)  A child can keep that label on their IEP until age 9.  Then your kid will be given one of the 13 above labels.  (My guess is that your child is younger than 9 and probably not older than Kindergarten age b/c it's relatively easy to keep off an autism label when they're young.)

So, if a child is school age and needs an IEP and has never had one, you can have all the medical documentation in the world, but they need to assign one of the 13 labels.  The creation of IDEA has artificially inflated who is counted as autistic, however, it's creation has also created specific programs.  There are designated publicly funded Autism and Asperger programs available in the public schools.  No specific, equivalent program exists for kids with ADHD for example.

So here's where you need to take the good with the bad as it were and accept where there is overlap and commonality among children.  Children on the spectrum may have difficulty in executive functioning.  So will children with ADHD as well as children who have LDs related to Disorder of Written Expression--what used to be commonly called dyslexia or dysgraphia.  So some kids are given "other health impairment" or "specific learning disability" but when they have more than one diagnosis, like so many kids have but may not have autism, the schools often push for the Autism label b/c it covers more than one area and since the 70s there's been concerted efforts to develop programs specifically for autism.

When you look at research methods for teaching children, the initial research may have been conducted with a certain group of children--Unstuck and On Target was developed with children on the spectrum.  The Kazdin Method was developed with children who have ODD (oppositional defiant disorder), which is quite rare.  However, these are best practices that can be used with pretty much [i]any child--SN or not[/i].

It's an imperfect, frustrating system.  There was a recent post by a mom who couldn't get OT for her child with fine motor delay primarily b/c her DD's speech had improved to the point that she would not longer eligible for services.  So a kid who can't hold pencil correctly can't get OT to practice b/c she doesn't fit into 1 of 13 checkboxes.  That's ridiculous, but that is the system we have.

That is why I was trying to give a historical context to how we ended up with what we have.  (The emphasis on autism also coincided with de-instutionalization of children, so it may explain why it was included specifically.  It may have been a product of good lobbying, that's why ESRD is included in Medicare coverage.  It's not the most common but a catastrophic disease.)

It was partly tongue and cheek but that is why I was encouraging parents to focus on what [b]services[/b] their child needs and make sure that these are what gets included in the IEP regardless of what label it's under.  Unfortunately the way they run meetings is that everything gets hung up on the designation b/c it's an outmoded, bureaucratic system.  But again it's what we have and given the state of Congress not likely to change any time soon.[/quote]

I really hope you don't know what you are talking about.

I am also fairly sure that states and LEAs can chose to use additional labels after 3. [/quote]

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